Boneshaker (Sci Fi Essential Books) (edition 2009)

my friend says this is utterly dire, I don't need to hear any more.

I'm vacillating between giving Boneshaker three and four stars. It mostly fell down for me for very, very subjective reasons -- liberal use of a trope I'm not fond of -- although there's also a bit of a problem with the pacing. In places it worked very well: beautifully tense and exciting. But after a while, the sneaking and hiding wears on you. It's like watching a movie consisting of nothing but scenes in which the characters crawl through tunnels. No matter how well-shot those scenes are, it gets boring.

The trope that irritated me was the trope of 'they just missed each other'. Briar and Zeke could have met several times before they actually do, and while that might have shortened the book if they hadn't missed each other, I'm not sure that would have been a bad thing. Still, that's one of my pet peeves. It always reminds me of romantic comedies, which invariably make me want to beat my head against whatever's convenient (and I got dragged to a fair number as a teenager).

I also wasn't terribly pleased with Zeke. He ran when he should have stayed still, and stayed still when he should've been running. I know that he wasn't psychic and doesn't know what the reader knows, but even early on, Rudy is obviously not the kind of guy he should be running with. You take what you can get, I guess, but...

I was much more impressed with Briar. An older, working class single mother, kicking so much ass. She doesn't make the same stupid decisions as Zeke, so she's a lot easier to sympathise with. She's not perfect, no, but she does what she thinks is right.

The setting is well done -- quite vivid, and oddly realistic despite the fact that, yeah, it's full of zombies. It's not the most convincing explanation, I guess -- gas that creates the living dead? -- but it's not too necessary, either. The whole thing with Minnericht... I called it, to some extent: I guessed why Briar was so sure about who he was (or, rather, wasn't). I liked it, though.

I enjoyed Boneshaker, yeah, but I'm not in a tearing hurry to read the other two books set in the same world. ( )

This is one of those cases where I had a completely different reaction than the rest of the world, so take it with a grain of salt. However, I had a really hard time here--I didn't particularly care about any of the characters and didn't feel invested enough in the world of the story to make it work. [Feb. 2011] ( )

A little bit slow for the first third, but the pace picks up once the protagonists are running from the zombies.

Now here's my gripe--I *know* that white Americans in the 1800s were, by and large, racist and xenophobic (hence the Chinese Exclusion Act), but did the first Chinese character *really* have to be the mute, inscrutable Chinaman whom no one hears approaching? And then the other Chinese in the book are, for the most part, nameless/personality-less groups even though there are, for reasons that are never explained (and no one seems curious about exploring), groups of Chinese men who stay behind the walls to pump fresh air into the Blighted city. ( )

(Refers to the audiobook.)

"A boneshakingly good listen"

Cherie Priest's BONESHAKER is a romp through an alternate Civil War era Seattle, torn apart by Leviticus Blue's Boneshaking Drill -- a Russian-funded experimental drilling engine designed to tunnel under the Alaskan ice, looking for gold. But something goes wrong when Blue tests the machine, and gas which would become known as "the Blight" begins to seep out of the ground, killing those who breathe it. And worse.

So a large section of the city is walled off, Blue has disappeared, and his widow, Briar Wilkes, is left to raise the son she didn't know she carried when the calamity struck. She and her son, Ezekiel, are treated with disdain and open contempt by the remaining townsfolk, believing she must have known what Blue was up to, and so blaming her in part for the new way of life on the "Outskirts" around Seattle.

Ezekiel, longing to clear the family name, heads into the city for answers, and Briar soon follows. Only then do they start to truly understand what has become of those who have been claimed by the Blight -- the "rotters" -- zombies whose appearance in the book is truly suspenseful and riveting. Add goggles and gasmasks (to protect against the Blight) and gadgets dreamed up to sustain human settlements within the ruins of the city, Civil War era airships, and a great cast of supporting characters, and it's no wonder that BONESHAKER has had the praise heaped upon it that it has. It's great fun and well-imagined.

Here, Kate Reading gives a great deadpan Briar Wilkes, capturing the frustration and urgency of a tired, bitter mother looking for her son, and putting a great voice behind Jeremiah Swakhammer, the big, armor-plated -- well, I don't want to give too much away. And Wil Wheaton helps bring Zeke and the characters he meets to life, particularly taking the day with his performances as Zeke, a certain Princess (this one is great!), and the mysterious "Dr. Minnericht." ( )